


The Dirty Three

by soundczechfic



Series: The Dirty Three [1]
Category: Johnny's Entertainment, KAT-TUN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Superheroes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-20
Updated: 2017-04-20
Packaged: 2018-10-21 06:32:56
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10679682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soundczechfic/pseuds/soundczechfic
Summary: Jin, Kame, and Pi are foster kids with superpowers on the run across North America.





	The Dirty Three

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 17 September 2007. Remix of an unrequitedangst fic that hadn't quite been written yet... I might have been unclear on the concept.
> 
> The boys grew up with foster families in America before realising they each have a special supernatural talent; Jin can set things on fire with his mind, Pi is telekinetic, and Kame has the power of healing. Together they make a perfect set. Now they're on the run from an organisation that wants to separate them and control their power. They're driving across America looking for Ryo and Ueda and running from the Agents. The fic is just kind of an excerpt from their constant road trip... Akame, Akamepi friendship.

  
At first, Pi drives and Jin sits in the passenger seat tapping his fingers on the dashboard and messing with the radio. Kamenashi sits in the backseat with his head against the window, eyes closed against the highway sun. Whenever Jin glances at him in the rearview mirror he looks tired and lonely framed in the slightly silver light filtering through the tinted windows; Pi and Jin have each other the way they always have, but Kamenashi is alone and Jin can’t stand it.

-

“Hey,” Jin says one day when they’ve pulled into a service station and Pi is inside paying for their gas. He twists in his seat to look at Kamenashi, the slight slump of his body against the sticky vinyl seat. “You okay?”

“What?” Kamenashi asks, surprised. “Yes,” he says. “I’m fine.” There’s a moment when they just look at each other, and Jin can feel that energy that always opens up between them, between the three of them, tug slightly, like a tiny hand yanking his sleeve.

“You’re sure?” Jin says.

“Yeah,” Kamenashi says, and smiles a little. “Thanks.”

-

The first time he saw Kamenashi, he knew who he was, the same way he thinks he might have known who Pi was when they were five years old and sharing Tonka trucks in the playground. He’d walked into the classroom his first day of school and seen Kamenashi’s head bent studiously over a workbook and he’d known it, even then; this kid belonged to them. Then Kamenashi had looked up and met his eyes, like he’d known it too, and Jin thought: _I have never owned something so beautiful._

He’s never told Pi that. He thinks he might be angry.

-

Sometimes Kamenashi gets bossy and pissy, usually when Jin and Pi are being irresponsible and incompetent. He refuses to hand the map over to Jin anymore just because one day Jin had been looking at the wrong page and they ended a state away from where they wanted to be. It’s kind of reassuring to have Kamenashi there. He’s more responsible than Jin would ever want or know how to be, and they need that right now.

It makes him uneasy to see the flash of annoyance in Pi’s eyes when Kamenashi starts giving orders, and sometimes Jin can feel the beginnings of that heat he can’t control in his fingertips, restless fire longing to be set free.

-

“Do you have a nickname?” Jin asks. He’s driving even though no-one wants him to; Pi is passed out from exhaustion in the backseat and he overpowered Kamenashi to get the keys. It’s harder than it looks to overpower Kamenashi. He looks tiny and delicate but he has thick, strong wrists and fast reflexes. Jin’s pretty proud of his victory.

“No,” Kamenashi says.

“Why not?” Jin asks. Jin has a hundred nicknames that he made up for himself and a hundred more that Pi uses for a week or a month and then forgets about.

“I don’t know,” Kamenashi says. The map is spread out on his lap even though Jin knows he memorised it a few hundred miles back. “No-one ever gave me one.”

“I’ll give you one,” Jin says.

Kamenashi turns his head away from Jin, into the light, but he looks pleased. “Okay,” he says.

-

Kamenashi becomes Kame because all the nicknames Jin knows are unflattering or undignified, and he can’t bring himself to call Kame an idiot. He likes saying Kame’s name now; Kame, Kame-chan, Kame-kun. Pi is wary at first the way Pi always seems strange and wary of Kame, but in the end he’s too lazy to resist an abbreviation. They become Jin and Pi and Kame, their short and familiar selves.

Sometimes, Kame sings along to the radio when Jin does, his voice loud and broken but oddly pretty. Jin likes Kame even better than Kamenashi.

When Kame drives, Pi likes to float things around the car because it freaks him out. He’d never do that to Jin because if Jin were to freak out they’d probably end up turned over in a ditch, but Kame never swerves the wheel even when his knuckles grow white and the muscles in his back are tight like fists. Jin thinks Pi’s power is awesome, a lot more awesome than Jin’s. The only thing fire is good for is hurting people, Jin thinks. When Pi gets mad glasses break and balloons pop but when Jin gets mad things turn to ash.

When Kame gets mad, everyone around him feels slightly queasy, like the beginnings of a stomach flu in their gut.

-

The others tend to take care of everything, and Jin takes care of them. Sort of. Not in the way that he cooks them food or makes sure they’re wearing warm clothes, because Kame does that. Not in the way where he makes sure they’re always alert, because that’s Pi. Jin takes care of their morale. It’s Jin that pokes a smile onto Pi’s face when the miles stretching out ahead of them are wearing thin, Jin that lets Kame baby him when he misses his siblings. He can’t do any of that organising stuff, but at least he can do something.

Sometimes Jin isn’t sure how decisions get made. They all go to sleep and they don’t know what they’re doing and then the next day Kame or Pi shake him awake and they’re on their way to Dallas or Albequerque or Miami. It takes him a long time to realise that sometimes Pi and Kame wake up and have discussions in the middle of the night, that sometimes they fight and things are frosty in the morning.

They’re camping one night when he’s woken by a sudden snap outside, like breaking branches. When he’d fallen asleep they’d been squashed together in their tent, Kame on one side and Pi on the other. He’d fallen asleep looking at the shell of Kame’s ear, the smooth round stud clutching to the lobe. Now he’s alone and he can see the silhouettes of his friend’s bodies through the thin blue walls, their shadows in the firelight.

Pi sounds annoyed, and that’s probably why the branch broke. Jin remains still, and listens. Everything feels tense and horrible like when he woke up in the middle of the night when he was a little kid and his parents were fighting about money. That’s what Kame and Pi are fighting about now, he thinks. Kame’s voice is still low and serious, but Jin hears the words, _broke_ , _starve_ , _dire_.

“I should use my powers for good instead of evil!” Pi yells suddenly, and Jin clutches his sleeping bag closer to his chin. When he was younger he had a stuffed panda that he’d hide his face in when this happened. He’s too old for stuffed toys now but he wishes he wasn’t.

“It’s not evil if we’re desperate,” Kame says and he’s trying to remain calm but he’s getting that frustrated shortness in his voice. “It’s not like I’m suggesting we steal from starving children.”

“YOU WANT ME TO BE A CRIMINAL,” Pi says.

“Pi,” Kame says.

“YOU WANT ME TO BE A CRIMINAL SO I’LL GO TO JAIL AND YOU CAN HAVE JIN TO YOURSELF?”

“WHAT?” Kame spits. “Don’t be an idiot.”

“DON’T CALL ME AN IDIOT.”

Jin feels like he should go outside and step in but he doesn’t know what he’d say or whose side he’d be on.

“You’re being an idiot!” Kame says. “I don’t want you to get caught. The last thing I want is for us to split up, okay. We need this. There’s no cash left. There’s nothing left to pawn except the car. If you hit up an ATM just once, we could be set for months.”

“I don’t want to,” Pi says miserably. “They’ll have cameras.”

Kame sighs. “I’ll do it,” Kame says. “You can break it open from far away, right? I’ll collect the cash. If they catch anyone, it’ll be me.”

This seems to horrify Pi as much as the original plan. “NO,” he shouts.

“We need this, Pi.” Kame says. “We really need this.”

The next night, they stay in a hotel and when Jin wakes up the next morning there’s a duffel bag full of cash on the bed.

-

In Iowa, an agent gets close enough to grab a chunk of Pi’s hair and Jin has to set the guy on fire. He has nightmares for weeks, a burning man snatching Pi to hell.

-

“Back home, I was the star of the football team,” Jin tells Kame one day. He’s sitting in the back seat and Kame is driving, and Jin has to lean over and peer around the headrest to see Kame’s face. Kame is wearing a pair of Pi’s aviator sunglasses and a huge floppy beanie. Jin knows he hasn’t shaved in a week but there’s only the barest hint of stubble around his chin.

“You were not,” Pi says. That fink called shotgun and he twists in his seat to glare at Jin. “I was!”

“DON’T LIE,” Jin shrieks. “LIAR.”

“I was the quarterback,” Pi says smugly.

“You were a shitty quarterback,” Jin grumbles. “I was the best fullback ever.”

“I was a great quarterback,” Pi hollers. “SHUT YOUR FACE.”

“Guys, calm down,” Kame says vaguely. “I’m sure you were both great.”

“We should play some time,” Jin says wistfully. He misses the team, the long green field and the jerky smell of the bawl. He misses the cheerleaders doing cartwheels and screaming his name.

“Um, I guess,” Kame says. “I don’t really know how to play.”

Pi stares at him incredulously, like Kame’s just become a stranger to him again. “You don’t like sports?” he asks, a little aggressively.

“I like sports,” Kame defends himself. “People get hurt too much in football.”

Jin thinks of what a football game would be like for Kame, who would feel every bruise and torn muscle like a nagging thought in his head.

“What sports do you like then?”

“When I was a kid I played baseball,” Kame says. “I was a pitcher. I stopped playing when Annie came. She was too young to look after herself after school.”

“Your parents made you quit baseball to look after your kid sister?” Jin asks indignantly. “That’s so unfair!”

“My parents didn’t make me,” Kame says, and Jin remembers: Kame doesn’t really have parents, not the way that he does or Yamapi does. Kame only has his siblings.

“We should play baseball some time,” Pi says, and Jin thinks it’s the nicest he’s ever been to Kame.

-

Back at the centre, they’d taken Jin into a room and made him light different things on fire, candles and papers and once, a live pig. He’d watched that pig squeal and die and felt like he could never be a good boy again. If he went home now he wouldn’t be his mother’s darling, and he doesn’t know what he is instead.

-

On their seventeenth birthday, Pi looks at their half full duffel bag of cash and their filthy clothes and says, “Let’s go shopping.”

Kame looks like he wants to object but there are holes creeping into his only pair of jeans and he can’t stand that they all look like homeless people. Which they are, Jin supposes, but he never wants to remind Kame of that.

They go to a mall with the biggest parking lot Jin has ever seen. They’re down in the south because Ueda once mentioned coming here as a child, but so far there’s been no sign of he and Ryo in any of the old plantation towns they’ve driven through. They’re running out of ideas now, drifting from state to state on the power of their hope.

It’s nice to be in a mall again, to see the other kids prowling the place in packs. It upsets Jin to realise that he doesn’t look like one of the cool kids anymore; his shabby clothes months out of date and his hair growing shapeless and wild. There’s a pretty girl in a mini skirt lingering by the fountain but when Jin meets her eye she doesn’t even look  
impressed.

“Let’s get haircuts,” he says angrily. He stomps into a salon where a girl with bright red asymmetrical bangs is filing her nails behind the register. She looks at them in bemusement as Jin demands immediate appointments but leads them out back where Jin’s hair is returned to its former glory.

They leave looking like new boys, which is the way Kame insisted upon it. “We need a change,” he says meaningfully under the eye of the stylist, but what he means is, we need the disguise. Kame’s hair is teastained and straight around his face and Pi’s is all weird and shaved up one side like he decided to become a skinhead and lost the nerve halfway. Jin thinks Pi looks cool but he can’t even really look at Kame anymore, not without blushing; there’s something serene about the curtain of his hair brushing his sharp cheekbone, something that makes Jin even more desperate.

“Hey Jin, everything okay?” Kame asks when they line up for burgers at McDonalds. Pi is singing some jingle about cheeseburgers Jin has never heard in his life and totally ignoring both of them in favour of gazing lovingly at the menu. Kame is looking at Jin from beneath that golden fringe, all serious brown eyes.

“What do you mean?” Jin says. “Everything’s fine.”

Kame’s gaze doesn’t shift for a beat, and then it does. “Your hair looks very handsome,” he says, and then turns to the cashier to order his fries.

-

Yamapi toys with his fringe, tries to tug it down longer over his eyes. “Kame,” he whines. “Can you heal my fringe?”

They’re in the changing rooms of a department store. Jin’s little cubicle is an explosion of t-shirts and jeans in discarded piles, red and blue fabric debris rumpled around his feet.

Kame wanders out of his dressing room, tugging a merle grey sweatshirt down over his hips. Behind him Jin can see orderly glimpses of clothing hanging on hooks and folded neatly on the stool.

“I don’t know,” he says doubtfully. “I don’t know if it works that way.”

“Try,” Pi pouts. “I look like such a dork!”

“You look fine,” Kame says impatiently, but he grabs Pi’s elbow and yanks him inside the little cubicle. Jin slithers through the door before Kame can close it just because he doesn’t want to be left outside alone. They huddle together, Kame’s hands framing Pi’s face and Jin hovering anxiously at their side.

When Kame’s fingers slide over the hair, at first it looks like nothing is going to happen; Pi’s bleached fringe spiking angry and defiant where the stylist cut it too short. Kame’s brows furrow and his lips turn a little white, and then the hair changes where it twists around his fingers, becomes smooth and healthy and new, a single streak of jet black amongst the blond.

“Uwah,” Jin breathes. He is so impressed right now.

“Sorry!” Kame says. “Sorry! I didn’t know that would happen!”

“What?” Pi asks, and turns to look at himself in the mirror, his elbow jostling Jin in the stomach as he twists. “Huh,” he says.

“I think it looks cool,” Jin says loyally. It does look cool, almost like they did it on purpose. Pi always looks cool.

“Hn,” Pi says, and tilts his head. “Thanks, Doc.”

“No problem,” Kame says with unconvincing nonchalance, head bowed a little and pale cheeks turning rosy with pride.

The slight twist of jealousy in Jin’s chest makes him feel like a monster.

-

“Hey Pi,” Jin says a few days later. Kame is asleep in the backseat, head curved uncomfortably towards his chest and hands curled into fists inside his sleeves. Pi is driving and going faster than Kame would ever allow were he awake. They have to be careful, he says. Kame is careful about everything. “Hey,” he repeats. “Pi.”

“Eh?” Pi replies eloquently.

“Um,” Jin hedges.

Pi looks at him over the top of his sunglasses. “What.”

“Nothing,” Jin says, sinking in his seat. He props his feet up on the dashboard and stares out his window; he knows that if he looks to the other side he’ll see Pi’s impatient, incredulous face.

“Jin,” Pi says. “Ne, Jin.”

“It’s nothing,” Jin says.

“Bakanishi,” Pi grumbles irritably. “What is it?”

Jin turns in his seat to face Pi and looks at Kame around the headrest. He looks young when he sleeps in a way he doesn’t when he’s awake, shoulders thin and slumped without conscious command. Jin rests his elbow on the back of his seat and dangles his arm over Kame’s bony knee.

“Did you ever notice anything about me?” Jin says, voice raising a plaintive note at the end.

“What do you mean?” Pi asks. “I noticed you can set things on fire with your mind?”

“No,” Jin says awkwardly, and twists around so he doesn’t have to look at Kame’s sleeping body anymore. “I mean like. The way we noticed things about Billy.”

Pi looks at him for a long moment. “Oh,” he says.

Billy has been in their class since kindergarten. He plays hockey and trumpet and is gay, and they have always known that, the same way they have always known that Mya Rivers is in love with Aaron Zhao; just because they do, just because they always have.

“No,” Pi says after a long moment. And then he says, “Not really,” and Jin doesn’t know what to make of that at all.

“What’s ‘Not really?’” he asks.

Pi lifts his eyes to the rearview mirror and glances at Kame. “We’ll we’re talking about him, right?” he says. “I noticed that.”

“SHHHHHHHHHHHH,” Jin hisses, snapping his eyes back to make sure Kame is still asleep. “Shhh,” he says.

“Jin and Kame, sitting in a tree,” Pi sings. “K I S S I N G.”

“PI,” Jin yelps desperately. “SHUT UP, PI.”

He hides his face in his hands. This is so embarrassing, like the time he was trying to look up Alice Corben’s skirt and Pi noticed and told the whole class when they were eight years old. This is embarrassing like when he was twelve and Pi’s cousin sat them down to tell them about porn.

“It’s not that big a deal,” Pi says nonchalantly.

Jin doesn’t believe that, because for him it would be a huge deal if Pi were in love with Kame, even if he didn’t have a thing for Kame himself. Sometimes Pi and Kame go off and make plans and hatch schemes together and even that makes Jin uneasy. He can’t stand the idea of Pi feeling like he’s missing out on something. He’s always wanted Pi to have everything he has, but he doesn’t want him to have Kame. Not the way Jin wants to have him anyway. Or something. This is all really confusing to Jin, like an algebra equation he can’t figure out, X = Kamenashi and Y=Pi, and Jin can’t figure out where he fits in all of this, or how they’re supposed to fit together. On the one hand he wants X + Y + Jin to equal BFF 4 LIFE, but on the other he longs for something else from Kame, something quiet and secret in his sleeping bag at night.

“It is a big deal,” he replies. “I’m sorry.”

They pull up at a stop sign, the first for miles and miles. “Nothing is going to change between you and me,” Pi says awkwardly, hands flexing on the steering wheel. “So don’t worry about that.”

“Okay,” Jin says.

“You should be careful though.” The car moves through the intersection with a rumble; they’ll probably need to dump this rustbucket soon and hotwire a new one, because it just can’t keep up anymore. “You know those girls back home, the good girls?”

Jin knows; he’d avoided messing around with those girls because they were the type that wanted more than a little bit of fun behind the bleachers, they wanted him to make some kind of commitment, wanted him to love them, and he’d never really wanted that in return. “The marrying kind?”

“Yeah,” Pi says. “Kame’s like those girls.” He frowns out at the road ahead like it has offended him somehow. “You can’t just mess around with him for a little bit and then forget about it, alright?”

Jin knows what he means; they need each other too much for broken hearts.

-

In Nebraska, he dreams of Ueda-san.

In his dream Jin is himself and his child self at once, sitting with bare feet kicking at the kitchen table.

His mother is baking him enormous cupcakes the size of dinner plates, placing them before him one by one, rows of monstrous pink and green flying saucers covered in sprinkles. She hums as she slides a candle into the centre of each cupcake.

“Light the candles, baby,” she says to him, her small motherly hands on his shoulders.

“I can’t,” Jin says, staring at the box of matches he is holding in his fist. It is covered in writing he can’t decipher, letters becoming blurrier the more he tries to focus on them. “I don’t know how to use these.”

The phone rings.

Jin answers, twisting the curly beige cord around his fingers. He’s never used one of these phones before, only seen them in old movies. He stares at the dial, realizing that there are faces in the circles where numbers should be, Pi’s face and Kame’s face and the grey face of an Agent. _Speed dial,_ some distracted part of him murmurs.

“Akanishi,” a voice says, only now it is behind him and when he turns it is Ueda Tatsuya and they’re standing together on the football field, surrounded by cheering fans.

Ueda’s hair is cropped close to the scalp only on one side, and his earring is missing. He looks tired, his left cheekbone shaded by a bruise that’s dark but fading.

“Uwah, Ueda!” Jin yells. “You look like a thug!”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” Ueda says peevishly. He sounds like one of the recorded messages they leave for James Bond in the movies. _This message will self destruct in five seconds,_ Jin thinks. He grabs Ueda’s wrist.

“What’s going on?” he asks. Around them the scenery keeps shifting, day to night and through deserts and bowling lanes, volcanoes and classrooms. Jin realises, vaguely, that Ueda’s balance is disturbed, that the hummingbirds and alarm clocks that keep drifting in and out of focus are falling out of Ueda’s mind.

“You have to stop looking for us,” Ueda says. “It’s not safe.”

In the distance fireworks explode a shower of red rose petals to the ground and Ueda says, “I’ll be in touch,” and Jin wakes up.

-

“Do you think they’re at the centre?” Pi asks over breakfast. They’re at a roadside diner, huddled close together in a booth, backs turned against the truckers and waitresses that make up the establishment’s average clientele.

Pi and Jin both look at Kame, waiting for his answer. Jin doesn’t know when they started that, but sometimes it seems like Kame ha the answers years before Jin even thinks of the questions. Pi says Kame’s constantly worrying and that’s why he figures things out, but Jin worries a lot too and he almost never works stuff out. Kame is quiet and pensive now, pushing his scrambled eggs around the plate with a fork.

“Maybe,” Kame says.

Jin squeezes both his hands together in one big fist, remembers the hummingbirds and fireworks and Ueda’s tired face.

“We can help them,” Jin insists.

“No,” Kame says, and shrinks a little under Jin and Pi’s matching expressions of rebellious disgust. “It’s not safe.”

“Who cares?” Pi asks angrily. “They’re our friends.”

“We can’t risk –“

“Kame,” Jin interrupts quietly.

“ _No,_ Jin,” Kame cries, voice rising shrill and insistent. “I’m sorry, but no! I’m putting my foot down! Today we’ll cross the state line and hopefully Ueda will come back and everything will be fine, but we are not under any circumstances going anywhere near the Centre, and that’s final.”

“ _Final,_ ” Pi grumbles. “You’re not the boss of us.”

When they get in the car Pi drives and Jin sits shotgun and nobody speaks to Kame all day.

-

Two nights later, Pi and Jin are ambushed at a general store a few miles out of a little country town in Colorado. They’d left Kame back at the campsite, sulking and tired of being ignored. Jin is standing at the register with a huge bag of chips and six packets of instant noodles when he first notices the men filtering through the door; those familiar black suits and crew cuts, the slight bulge of a concealed weapon at the breast.

“Pi,” Jin says, but Pi’s already noticed. He’s standing by the sunglasses rack, a ridiculous pair of pearly pink grandma’s sunglasses perched on his nose. His mouth hangs open in irritation, as if this is just an obnoxious interruption and not a potentially fatal trap.

“Come quietly,” one of the men says. “We already have your friend.”

Jin feels a single perfect pulse of terror and a rack of polyester scarves bursts into flames.

“Bullshit,” Pi says belligerently. “We’d know if you did."

_Yes_ , Jin thinks, and reaches out across the link to find Kame, tense and afraid but running, terrified but free.

“We will soon enough,” the man says, and the store explodes into chaos.

-

They get away bloody and bruised; Pi has a large burn up his back where one of the agents threw him into a stack of burning newspapers and Jin has a thick across his left cheek. It oozes blood that flows and crusts down his neck. They need to find Kame, fast, while the wounds are fresh and easy.

He reaches out with his mind. Pi is a solid and reasurring presence at his side, but when he finds Kame all he feels is fear.

-

When they get back to camp, Kame’s alone there with an agent, but he’s not the one in danger.

“What happened?” Pi asks. Kame is kneeling at the agent’s side, hands on his face. The man’s body is twisted and emaciated with disease, lesions blooming across his pale skin.

“I didn’t mean to,” Kame cries, distraught. “I didn’t even know I—“

“It’s okay,” Pi says, and crouches next to Kame. "It’ll be okay. Jin, get the car.”

They take the agent to a nearby hospital, leaving him slumped in a wheelchair in the emergency room, surrounded by teenagers with broken limbs. Jin thinks Kame might be crying as they stumble back to the car, but he isn’t sure.

“They won’t be able to help him,” Kame says miserably when their car rolls out of town. “He’s terminal.”

“You don’t know that,” Pi says. He’s sitting in the backseat with Kame, hich has never happened before.

Kame leans his head against the window, eyes on the trees that whiz by in the darkness. “Yes I do,” he says. “I already tried to save him.”

-

Kame heals their wounds in the car and then passes out for hours, head curled into his knees and arms over his face. They drive all night and the next day Pi decides to check them into a hotel; they need the luxury right now, he says.

‘Luxury’ is a motel off the interstate with faded orange carpet and lumpy pillows, but at least it has a bath. That’s where Kame heads immediately, into the slightly dingy bathroom and into a scalding hot bath.

Jin and Pi sit quietly in the brown room outside until Pi says, “I’m going to go talk to him.” He closes the door behind him and all Jin can hear is the slight scuffle of their muffled voices, Pi’s low, lazy drawl sliding beneath Kame’s slight hysteria.

Jin sits on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest.

He remembers the first time his power hurt somebody; the way he’d stared at the charred remains of the house afterwards, the way he’d felt like there was something inherently bad inside of him.

He can’t imagine what it’s like for Kame, whose power had always seemed so pure.

-

When Pi comes out of the bathroom the knees of his jeans are wet from kneeling on the floor and he looks exhausted. “He’ll be okay,” he says, and collapses on the bed.

Jin knocks before he goes in. He scratches the bridge of his nose anxiously; Kame’s face is pale but his cheeks are flushed and his eyes look puffy.

Jin purses his lips. “You okay?” he asks, voice cracking when he tries to say more.

Kame smiles a little bitterly. Usually he’d rush to say, ‘Yes I’m fine,’ ‘Don’t worry about me, Jin’. Usually he’d rush to assuage Jin’s anxiety, but now he just sits there with that strange little smile.

“Pi says I have to hug my inner child,” he says. They look at each other through the steam. The bath is filled with huge clouds of pink tinged bubbles, spilling out over the top of the tub. “Then he poured a whole bottle of bubble bath into the water.”

Jin sits against the wall beside the tub, leans his cheek on the rim near Kame’s elbow. “You’re still a good person,” he says.

“No I’m not,” Kame denies. He sniffles. “I killed somebody. I’m a monster.”

“No you’re not,” Jin insists, “but I’d still love you if you were.”

Kame’s wet fingers thread into his hair. They sit there for a long time, until the bubbles pop and the water goes cold.  



End file.
